CHAIN FUSION LIVE!
Live Stream Q & A with Louis Liu, Founder of Omnity
Join Kyle Langham, Director of Data and Analytics, of DFINITY in this livestreamed interview with Louis Liu, founder of Omnity Network, the day after Omnity’s launch.
In this interview, they discuss the evolution of the Omnity development team, the success of the Red Envelope Runes app, and Omnity’s mission to become the liquidity and security hub for the Bitcoin Ecosystem.
Watch the inverview here, or read the transcript below:
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: It’s exciting times for Omnity. I know this weekend you guys had a lot of news. I want to start by giving us the background of Omnity Network.
Give us the origin story, where are you guys at and did you get started?
Louis Liu | Omnity: It’s quite a long story, and the team has been at it for five years. At the very beginning, we had a group of blockchain developers and crypto researchers. We shared the same vision that the future will be multi-chain; back at that time, we didn’t believe that “one chain fits all’’ or “one chain beats them all” would happen.
At that time, we had no idea about a “modular thesis.” But we believed that there would be many blockchains optimized for different use cases and functions and that they would be well connected into a so-called “Internet of Blockchains” that would lay down infrastructure for Web3.
We thought that the key technology would be the interoperability stack. At the time, we took some grants from the Layer 1 ecosystem like NEAR, Solana, Cosmos, and Oasis — quite a few of them — to build open-source, cross-chain bridge components for them. We believe that the cross-chain stack itself should be trustless, or there would be a bottleneck of security or decentralization.
We did a lot of research and found out that the IBC protocol, the Interchain Blockchain Communication stack invented by Cosmos, was the most comprehensive, generic purpose, trustless interoperability protocol at that time. Even now, IBC is still the golden standard of trustless crosschain communication. We cooperated with Cosmos Interchain Foundation to build the IBC protocol on blockchains other than Tendermint itself. We implemented the first heterogeneous IBC protocol on Substrate and then on NEAR.
During the journey, we found that IBC was great. It’s permissionless, and it’s trustless. But it’s very hard to implement the protocol on blockchains other than Tendermint since the secret of trustlessness is about onchain light client verification — It’s like running a light client inside chain B to verify the consensus of chain A. It’s very hard for most of the blockchains other than Tendermint.
At the beginning of last year, we came to an idea: how about we transplant all light clients on a proxy chain？ If all the blockchains “trust” or “rely” on this proxy chain, they can indirectly verify the consensus of their peers, right?
And so we did a lot of research. Actually, we thought we would have to build the Proxy chain from the ground up. Fortunately, we found that ICP meets all our needs. It’s highly efficient and programmable, and the chain key technology resolved the hardest part.
After the proxy chain does the consensus verification, it needs to put an attestation to the output. We found out that the smart contract on ICP can call the Chain key stack to call this marvelous MPC-TSS scheme and give out a single signature, which means the ICP canister has verified the result. So, on the target chain only one signature needs to be verified to ensure the whole process has been gone through.
So, we started to build on ICP at the beginning of last year. We called ourselves Octopus Network before Omnity, and our Octopus v.2 mainnet was based on the light client on ICP.
During the process, we found that ICP was even more powerful than we thought before, and we could resolve some hard and stubborn problems faced by interoperability, such as off-chain relayer and the fungibility problem if the asset goes through different paths. All these things can be perfectly resolved if we build a unified Interoperability stack on ICP. This idea turned out to be the plan of Omnity.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: Yeah, that’s awesome. Could not have given a better explanation for what we within DFINITY think about chain fusion than exactly what you just said.
You mentioned two important parts of multi-chain or what we call “chain fusion.” You mentioned “security,” and then you mentioned “complexity,” — like having to remove complexity in a multi-chain solution. Walk through the parts of those two aspects for Omnity —
How do you guys view security and complexity?
Louis Liu | Omnity: You know security is always the number one consideration from the perspective of interoperability. There are a lot of bridge hacks, people lost a lot of money in these disasters. So, we set a very high standard of security. We call it “fully on-chain.”
It’s not just about being fully trustless. Fully trustless is about connection, but security has another level; it’s about reliability, or, to use a tech term, “liveness.” If a user wants to use the interoperability protocol, it should be there especially if people want to drawback or redeem their assets from the application chain to the regional chain. They should always be able to do that, right?
But even if some interoperability stack achieves “full trustlessness,” they still have an assumption of some off-chain process. So, we set a new standard we call “fully onchain.” All the interoperability components are smart contracts, so they will always be there. Even if aliens suddenly kidnapped Omnity, people do not need to worry about it. The bridge is fully onchain, people can always rely on it and use it. So, I think it’s a huge step. It’s another level of security.
About “complexity,” we call it “usability.” We try to encapsulate all the technical details from the user. Like we did in Omnity’s interoperability stack, people just need to initiate a transaction on the original blockchain. After that, things will be taken care of by Omnity.
The assets will arrive at the target chain in a short period of time. It all depends on the finality time of the source chain and target chain. Omnity will not bring additional latency or additional cost during the whole process.
I think the novelty of Omnity is that we achieve a user experience comparable with trust-based bridges while keeping a very high standard of decentralization and security.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: I think that’s such a great way to say it because there’s always a trade-off between security and user experience, and the goal is to balance those two. But also, basically, choose a solution to optimize.
Unfortunately, within crypto, we’ve far too often gone to the user experience side, and that’s resulted in these hacks and scams where a centralized authority ended up having the ability to run away with the money.
Or we go to the other side, which is we focus all on security and create so many hurdles to the user experience that it’s just not fun to use the product — it’s not a good experience. So, I always go back to, like, when will my parents get into crypto? They’re not getting into crypto if the user experience has 17 steps. They’re used to a good Web 2 experience.
I spent this weekend getting some Runes. It was an absolutely phenomenal user experience. I’ve gotten to see a Red Envelope. A lot of people in the chats mention Red Envelopes, so obviously, the secrets are out.
Yesterday, you guys launched Runes integration with this Red Envelope; walk us through… what exactly this is?
Louis Liu | Omnity: Sure, Omnity published a Litepaper about two months ago. At the time, we positioned Omnity as the “interoperability stack for the modular world.” But now, we’ve taken a step forward, and we position Omnity as the liquidity and security hub of the blockchain ecosystem. So, we will focus on Bitcoin, or, as we say, “we’re all in Bitcoin.”
Omnity will work as a hub. It will absorb all kinds of Bitcoin assets and redirect them to many highly usable blockchains, such as ICP itself or blockchains that act as so-called Bitcoin Layer2, [even if technically, there is no “BitcoinLayer2” at the time being.] There are end-user-facing, highly usable blockchains that majorly deal with Bitcoin assets. So, they need security to pass security to the Bitcoin network, and also they need Bitcoin assets. Omnity will have helped them to do both.
Our interoperability stack went live after halving. Yesterday, we launched the first showcase application, Red Envelope. We’re trying to show people, especially developers, that if we can bridge Runes token or any other Bitcoin assets to a highly efficient, highly usable blockchain like ICP, what can we create for users? What can we bring to Bitcoin asset holders?
I will share my screen to show how easily you can send out a Red Envelope with Runes tokens inside, and people really enjoy playing with it!
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: I’ll say yeah, as you get that ready, I’ll just say the user experience was so easy that yesterday, when I was playing with it, I was just like, there has to be something else here. This is just too phenomenal of a user experience. I must not be understanding what’s going on. But really, kudos to you guys, and I’m excited I’ve got my HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH Runes, so that’s my retirement plan now. If you’re ready?
Louis Liu | Omnity: Can you see my screen? So this is the bot, the private DM window with the bot, and we can see there is a wallet created and maintained by the bot for every user.
And the wallet will show my ICP address. If I type the command /wallet, I can show my balance. You can see I’m really a rich guy! 😃
So, you can also transfer some ICP.
The wallet can deal with other types of ICP assets in the future. It’s a fully functional custodian wallet that people use directly in the Telegram window.
I cross-chain transfer many Runes for sharing and for sending Red Envelopes to people. Now, I will create a really big Red Envelope for five lucky people, and I can attach some URLs or messages, too. What is the URL for this show?
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: Let me send it to you, Here we go. I love how you guys are using Telegram as your user interface. You’re meeting users where they’re at and just integrating within the Telegram UI.
Louis Liu | Omnity: Yeah, it makes people easily interact with blockchain applications.
So, I have created a Red Envelope. Now, I’m about to select a group. I think “Omnity Network Official” will be a good one to send to.
Okay, so here’s my Red Envelope!
It’s been snatched out very quickly!
I can list all the Red Envelopes with /list
We are trying to show people that it’s a very convenient way to interact with a blockchain like ICP. We will also open these tools to other developers. ICP developers can invite their application inside the bot, and people can interact with their app directly from Telegram.
🧧[Go here for the full Omnity Red Envelope HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH User’s Guide to play Red Envelope!]🧧
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: So, this HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH Runes is a Rune that you probably pre-etched on Bitcoin?
Louis Liu | Omnity: Yes, so I will show another window.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: Credit to everyone who snatched up that Red Envelope as quickly as Louis could get it posted. So good for you guys to be so engaged in this livestream!
Louis Liu | Omnity: So the Rune HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH is NO.431 and is 100% open-minted, and for now, it’s only been minted a few thousand times. [https://www.runescan.net/runes/431]
The Mint time will run out within about three weeks. So, people who see this offer still get plenty of time to mint you some “HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH” Runes.
People will get 100k for each mint, and then you can bridge it to ICP by inputting your ICP bot wallet address and transferring it to ICP. Then you can send out a lot of Red Envelopes. And you can attach a small advertisement, URL, or message, on each Red envelope you send out.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: So, in this case, you have HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH as the Rune and I’m assuming developers could have their own Rune named after their product name as long as it meets the Rune naming criteria?
Louis Liu | Omnity: Yes, I think app developers can each do their own Runes. It’s a great way to bootstrap a community, and they can also put in place some very hot Runes. There are some Runes tokens with thousands or even nearly 1 million holders. So, it’s a very big community that’s ready to be engaged with.
You provide an application that can provide some utility or entertainment for a specific Runes holder and this community will spread the word for you. It will be very actively engaged with your application. So, suddenly, you have a lot of users, right? I think application developers should consider Runes or some meme coins as a great go-to-market strategy.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: We jumped straight into how to get these Runes from your Red Envelope, but what exactly is a Bitcoin Rune?
What is a Rune and how does it work?
Louis Liu | Omnity: For quite a long time, people have looked at Bitcoin as a Settlement network for BTC itself. But people keep trying to issue new assets on the Bitcoin network.
I think last year, with first Ordinals and then BRC 20, it took off. So, people keep issuing new tokens on the Bitcoin network, but the standard is relatively ad hoc. There are BRC 20, ARC 20, RLC 20…a lot of asset standards that make the ecosystem fragmented.
Luckily, the founding father of Ordinals, the protocol that made all these things happen, decided to represent a well-considered fungible token standard called Runes. It’s just gone live for less than nine days and there are more than 40,000 Runes tokens that have been etched, and the number one Runes have more than one million mints.
So, you can see that there are a lot of activities. The number one Runes has an issuer who spends nearly 40 BTC to ensure the position. I don’t know who they are, but whoever they are, they surely have a lot of BTC in their pocket. We can see that they are well-funded. They should be an established team with a very ambitious plan in their mind.
So, it’s not just about vision. It’s not just about mint. Some established teams with great resources have jumped in and are about to build something marvelous in this new landscape.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: You showed an interface for developers or anyone looking to launch their Runes. How do people get access to that? What’s the web address?
Louis Liu | Omnity: Yes, so Omnity partnered with RunesCC. We present a Runes explorer called runescan.net, so people can find out all the onchain information about Runes, and also it provides free minting tools.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: Oh, so this is just for the general area where somebody could etch a ruin. Is there open access to the Red Envelope product?
Louis Liu | Omnity: This website is about all the Runes, and of course, you can see the Red Envelope (RE) Runes, so HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH is NO 431, and also, you can mint it. You can mint any other Runes by utilizing this website.
For now, the Omnity interoperability stack only supports the whole HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH Runes, but we will keep adding some additional Runes to the bridge.
There are a lot of Runes, like more than 50,000. We try to choose them carefully, so we negotiate and discuss with the team behind the asset to ensure that this is valuable or will be valuable in the future. So, we add support on the bridge and bring this asset to other blockchains.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: So, you showed Telegram, both as from the project side, where you can create the Red Envelopes and then preload them with some Runes, but then also you showed it from the user side where you can snatch those Runes —
Is expanding beyond Telegram to other social media, whether Web2 like Facebook or X or Web3 like Open Chat, part of the roadmap?
Louis Liu | Omnity: We just launched the application, and in a little more than 24 hours, we received a lot of feature requests from our community.
In the following week, we are about to add two features to the product. One is swap, so people can swap their HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH Runes with ICP and vice versa. We will integrate an AMM DEX behind the bot, and when people have ICP on their custodian wallet, they can initiate a cross-chain transfer directly inside the bot.
Do you want to transfer Runes back to the Bitcoin network? It’s not a problem. Directly type /transfer, some amount (of Runes), and a Bitcoin address. It costs around one ICP to do this cross-chain transfer because the Bitcoin gas fee is quite high, but the interaction will be very simple. So, we are about to add these 2 features: Swapping and Cross-chain transfer, or what we call “redeem” Runes to Bitcoin directly inside the bot.
In the future, once Omnity connects other blockchains, like other Layer1s, Bitcoin Layer2s, or Ethereum Layer2s, people can directly transfer their Runes token inside the bot to all these newly connected blockchains.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: I love it. You really touched on that when you talked about security and the need to remove third parties or intermediaries, right? So you just have ICP. You just have Bitcoin.
This is a really good way to judge how secure stuff is, how easily you can peg out so you have your ‘BRIDGED’ or whatever you want to call it token on ICP, how easy it is to go back to Bitcoin, and whether it requires an approval process from a centralized authority.
What you’re saying is, “No, if you have the bridged token and you want to get back to Bitcoin, there’s no centralized party you have to go through to do that. It can be integrated into Telegram, it can be integrated into any wallet.” The ability to peg in and peg out is a key component that again differentiates Omnity from a bridge.
Louis Liu | Omnity: ‘Bridge’ is quite a vivid metaphor that links different blockchains. But you know, there are tons of different ways to connect blockchains. I hope some clever guy from our community can come up with a new term other than ‘bridge’ to differentiate this fully on-chain interoperability from other trust-based interoperability or some bridge that relies on off-chain components or even multisig.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: Yeah, I love it. I agree with this comment from our audience here: “My inner child screams with excitement every time I snatch a Red Envelope! Don’t judge! OMNITY to the moon!”
Again, that goes back to that user experience that you guys built into Telegram, where it’s just so easy. You can click a button, you get it, and then, like you said, there’s the ability to transfer to other people. So let’s say maybe a colleague of mine does help for me. I can send him some HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH tokens as a thank you, and I also have the ability to go back to Bitcoin.
So, really, I love how you guys have packed Telegram as a user interface, and then obviously, I assume the best practice would be, you want to keep it because it’s Telegram and it is controlling the private keys or at least controlling access to your wallet, you probably want to keep small amounts of money, and then if you do start using this for more, you can easily just send that to a non-custodial wallet on ICP or on Bitcoin.
Louis Liu | Omnity: Yes, so we use it as a “light” wallet. It’s not for “trading. Don’t put a lot of money into the bot custodian wallet. It’s very easy to use, but it’s not a place where you want to store all your crypto assets.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: I hope both ICP and non-ICP developers and teams are watching this presentation and want to participate in the Runes. Maybe they see something that could be useful within their app or just a marketing tool. How can they participate? What’s the first step they should take to participate in Red Envelope?
Louis Liu | Omnity: Yeah, they can snatch some Red Envelope directly in the group, and if they want to send a lot of them, they need to mint HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH Runes and cross-chain transfer these Runes to their bot wallet addresses, or once the swap function is there, it’s right around the corner, they can buy some HOPE•YOU•GET•RICH Runes by paying ICP and then they can create a lot of Red Envelopes with a small advertisement attached to each of them and use it as a very cost-effective and interesting marketing tool.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: Awesome. Developers and entrepreneurs want their products to be used by 100% of the world, not the small percentage of us who are really deep into crypto.
I think we’ve really gone down the rabbit hole on Red Envelopes. It’s obviously the first product from Omnity. You guys hit a home run right off the bat, touching in on Runes and really creating a phenomenal user experience.
What is the roadmap or the vision for Omnity?
Louis Liu | Omnity: Omnity’s mission is based on an assumption or a judgment that Bitcoin will become a general purpose settlement layer since there are now asset standards like Runes and Ordinals for non-fungible tokens.
Bitcoin is still the number one blockchain in the crypto world. It has the highest level of decentralization, the widest recognition, and also the strongest social consensus. So, it is the best place to issue all kinds of assets. So, the Bitcoin Network could be a settlement layer for crypto, Web3, the Internet, or even the real economy.
We hope that Bitcoin will be the settlement layer for the world economy because it is a common good. No one can control Bitcoin, and no known force can crack it. So, it’s an “impartial settlement layer.” A settlement layer should be impartial and “non-abusable” so everyone can access this common good equally in a permissionless and fully open way.
But, as you know, we cannot put a lot of transactions on Bitcoin itself. So, there should be a lot of execution layers optimized for special applications. We call them “application-specific blockchains” or “domain-specific blockchains,” but they can all sit around Bitcoin. Providing there is a very secure and reliable bond between the settlement layer and all the execution layers, this structure will work. It will be ready to handle tons of transactions so that people can use it as a decentralized intermediary that coordinates people’s interactions and transactions on the Internet.
Omnity, armed with the technology provided by ICP, would like to be the bond between the settlement layer Bitcoin and all kinds of execution layers.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: Yeah, I love that. Back in like the maybe 2018-ish-2017ish range there was this idea of Ethereum as a testnet for Bitcoin. Basically, like, Ethereum will go on, and it’ll try out all sorts of new things, and what doesn’t work will just stay on Ethereum, what does work will come back to Bitcoin, and that was an idea that kind of got out of fashion, I think a few years ago.
But now it seems like that vision is actually, you know, essentially what Ethereum became, and then the L2 is built on top of Ethereum — that’s almost what’s coming on to Bitcoin where, exactly like you said, you have the settlement layer, and then you want to have faster cheaper transactions on like an L2, and Omnity is now basically providing the toolset for people to build those applications on that L2.
Louis Liu | Omnity: Yes, Omnity will be a Bitcoin Layer2 Enabler. We provide an interoperability stack and also shared security service to these Layer2s.
All the execution chains of the so-called “Layer2,” are their own blockchain. They either pack their security with Bitcoin Network with some validity proof scheme, or they can share economic security from Bitcoin.
So, Omnity will do what EigenLayer did for Ethereum. We are about to do this for Bitcoin, considering that BTC has a much larger market cap than Ethereum, which makes Bitcoin the single biggest economic source in the crypto world. Through Omnity, Bitcoin Layer2 will enjoy multibillion-dollar level security with very little cost.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: Here’s a question from the community —
What problem does Omnity solve that the IC does not solve natively?
Louis Liu | Omnity: Omnity is part of the Bitcoin ecosystem, but the protocol itself is solely built on ICP. So, I know that the fans of ICP hope that all the economic activity will happen on ICP, but from Omnity’s point of view, we’d rather be an “unopinionated infrastructure.” So, we don’t care about what type of blockchain it is; if they can bring some utility, entertainment, or profit to Bitcoin asset holders, we will direct Bitcoin assets to that blockchain.
We hope that the Red Envelope application shows how usable an ICP application can be. But, you know, tons of other blockchains have their own merit to support some type of application. Omnity will be the Hub to redirect and zoom the Bitcoin assets everywhere.
We hope that all the ICP application developers will realize that Omnity is about to bring a lot of Bitcoin asset liquidity from Bitcoin ICP, and they should try to share this opportunity and compete for this liquidity with applications on other blockchains. We care about what our users care about. If people want to use any application on any blockchain, we will set up the link and connections
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: That’s absolutely the vision for a chain fusion: to have applications that can leverage every single blockchain. At least part of that application should live on ICP to take advantage of the chain key technology stack, the HTTPS outcalls, and the ability to read and write from any blockchain. So, for the most part, blockchains have their own unique optimization. And if you want to build a specific product, you’d be able to use the blockchain that helps you accomplish that.
I think of it when I go back to when I was a teenager, and this is perhaps dating myself, but I remember when Windows came out. Before Windows, you typically used DOS. So, to access any files and folders on your computer you would use a DOS interface. You could do what you needed, but there was a technical hurdle there. When Windows came out, it basically abstracted away that technical hurdle and made it a lot more like quality of life for the user. I feel like that might be a good analogy for Omnity, right? You know, you basically weigh that complexity for the developer and just give them a nice toolset to use.
Louis Liu| Omnity: Yeah, it’s a very great analogy. From a technical perspective, we rely on the Bitcoin integration of ICP to bring Bitcoin assets, BTC, or Runes to ICP. But for other blockchains, we rely on on-chain light client verification.
I would say Omnity has unparalleled experience in implementing or transplanting on-chain light clients to a runtime environment like ICP provides. We have transplanted many kinds of light clients, Tendermint light clients, and NEAR light clients — we will enable the light client equivalent verification on ICP for any major type of Layer2 — ZK rollup, OP rollup. So, based on this light client verification, we can bring Bitcoin assets from ICP to other blockchains while still fully trustless and fully on-chain. This is an add-on from Omnity to the existing ICP tech stack.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: So, obviously, you guys have a Bitcoin first thesis. Basically, it’s where the liquidity lives for our industry. Runes was your first success in terms of interoperability.
Should we expect to see things like BRC20 or any other kind of Bitcoin standard, like Ordinals?
Louis Liu| Omnity: So, the sure thing is Ordinals; once the chain key Schnorr is enabled on the ICP mainnet, we will support Ordinals and NFT, but we need to wait and see about other fungible token standards.
Personally, I hope that all the builders, wallets, exchanges, and token issuers can convert to a single standard. It will make everyone’s life easier. But, I know there are still a lot of BRC token holders and projects which are built on BRC20 or other token standards.
Hopefully, Runes could be the ERC20 for Bitcoin. ERC 20 was a huge leap for Ethereum. People stick to the same standard so all the wallets and all the applications can simply integrate with each other. I hope Runes will be the glue to make the whole Bitcoin ecosystem coherent and work together, and it will make everyone’s life easier, especially for developers. If we see that’s about to happen, we may not support additional Bitcoin fungible token standards.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: Yeah, at some point, you have to stop the standard expansion. There’s a good comic where somebody says, “There are 14 different standards for this. We need to solve this and get to one standard! Then the next panel says, “Now there’s 15 different standards!”
Good question from the community — When will threshold-schnorr upgrades be in effect? — I don’t have an exact date for you. I think DFINITY will put out an exact date in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that. But I will say, I’m in the northern hemisphere and think it’ll be summertime. I think I’ll be able to watch that go live while I’m in my bathing suit or something. So that’ll give you maybe a little bit of a hint — we’re talking months, we’re talking weeks.
Louis Liu| Omnity: Yeah, that is why we were so happy that we chose ICP. Whether it’s June or July, it will be the first threshold-Schnorr available to application developers and protocol developers like us, so we can put Taproot assets like Ordinals in place. I’m sure Omnity will be the first one to bridge Ordinals assets in a fully on-chain way thanks to the threshold-Schnorr signature.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: That’s gonna be a lot of fun. Threshold-Schnorr also unlocks Solana as well — being able to read and write to the Solana blockchain. And obviously we have the Ethereum integration going; it’s on testnet now, going mainnet really shortly. We’ll have a date out really soon when we release the roadmap. Obviously, you guys have a Bitcoin-first thesis —
How do you see expanding your hub to other blockchains?
Louis Liu| Omnity: So, for Omnity, there are two types of blockchains: settlement chain and the execution chain.
The first settlement chain we support is obviously Bitcoin. So, we can bring a token that’s natively issued on Bitcoin to other execution chains. I think the second settlement chain will be Ethereum. And, of course, we can support ICP as a settlement chain, so all the SNS tokens that are issued on ICP can go around to other blockchains.
For execution chains, the range will be much broader. We can currently support Tendermint-based blockchains, Substrate-based blockchains, and Polygon CDK-based blockchains. We will expand the scope to include OP stack-based layer 2. Once we implement the light client verification or equivalent verification algorithm on ICP, we can bring you a bunch of blockchains based on this stack.
But for Solana, even if we have chain key Schnorr at hand, we still need to overcome the on-chain verification for Solana consensus. Since there is no battle-tested onchain light client implementation for Solana, that is where Omnity can contribute. I think our experience will allow us to be the first, or in the first batch, of those who can embrace the light client or light client equivalent verification. It may be based on ZK-proof technology so we can bring Solana to the network.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: Awesome, like, the future’s so bright, and the future is just 2024! We’re not talking years out. You guys came into the ICP ecosystem last year, and you have been highly active. You’ve popped up on my radar multiple times in multiple different connotations, and business development is one of those areas — I see you guys interacting with other applications within the ICP ecosystem.
Are there any partnerships or collaborations that you are working on?
Louis Liu| Omnity: Yes, we met the major Bitcoin-related ICP ecosystem projects, and we are keeping the conversation going.
Helix DEX will be the first to list Runes tokens as $RICH. Since we have brought Runes to ICP in ICRC2 standard format, it’s ready to be integrated with all kinds of Defi protocols on ICP. We also have a conversation with Bitfinity and others.
The first stop of all the Bitcoin assets that Omnity builds will be ICP. So, all the ICP applications can enjoy the liquidity first. I hope developers will be interested in this new trend. Omnity is very open to cooperating with our ecosystem friends. We can even help them to do marketing since we have a community. We have this bot, and we can increase the exposure to the DApps built on ICP that are related to Bitcoin.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: So you have Wormhole. There’s also LayerZero. There are a few other similar products. Walk us through how Omnity is differentiated from what’s already out there in the marketplace.
How is Omnity differentiated from what’s already out there in the marketplace?
Louis Liu| Omnity: I think there are a few dozen, or even more than 100, in the Interoperability stack out there, and at least 10 or 20 of them are worth noticing. Since blockchain interoperability is very complex, we try to find a balance point. People want high security with very low cost and latency. So, we need to find a balance point based on our tech stack. I’ll do a one-on-one comparison with Omnity and WormHole and leave out the others since there are so many.
Wormhole is an interoperability stack based on a “guidance network.” Each guidance has its own node, and they form a consensus about what’s going on on the source chain. Then, they relay the message to the target chain. However, the target chain needs to trust this guidance network. WormHole is about to evolve into a ZKP-based interoperability stack, which is marvelous since it’s trustless. But I think Omnity will have two major advantages compared with WormHole.
One advantage is that we’re still fully on-chain. WormHole will have to rely on off-chain components, the ZK prover and the relayer, to work. If the prover or the relayer goes down, the bridge will be broken. But since Omnity is fully on the chain, there is no way to stop it.
The other advantage is the cost. ZK verification is still expensive. It takes more than 200k gas on the EVM blockchain to verify a ZK proof. For comparison, in Omnity, it is only needed to verify one ECDSA signature to ensure the result from Omnity is tracked, and this one signature verification will only cost 3k gas, two orders of magnitude compared with ZKP verification.
Since we minimize the cost, we do not need to batch the messages. We bring all the crosschain messages directly to the blockchain without waiting. A ZK-based bridge needs to batch its crossing message every hour or half an hour to dilute the verification cost. It will bring in additional latency, so people must wait one or half an hour to finalize crosschain transactions.
But in Omnity’s case, the crosschain transaction will be finalized in terms of a few seconds since we directly bring the message to the target chain without additional latency. So, our tech stack is about cost and latency minimization.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: You guys recently rebranded from Octopus Network. In fact, at ETHDenver, I recently took home an Octopus Network plushie, Otto.
Walk us through the rebrand from Octopus to Omnity?
Louis Liu| Omnity: Yes, at the beginning of this year, we were about to launch the Omnity Litepaper, and we still thought there would be two protocols — Omnity for interoperability and Octopus for shared security. But when we talked to people and to some partners, we saw that there is a huge demand from Bitcoin Layer 2 for security. They are eager to pack their security into Bitcoin. But for now, there is no practical way to do that.
I think our experience in shared economic security between blockchains is valuable to this newly emerging Bitcoin ecosystem. That is why we will do both interoperability and shared security in the Omnity stack and serve the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. By doing that, essentially, we will transform Octopus into Omnity. So, Omnity will be the next phase of the Octopus Network.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: Awesome. I love it. I feel we’ve gone a little bit over our scheduled time. We touched on so many topics, is there anything we missed that you wanted to leave us with?
Louis Liu| Omnity: I think there are a lot of topics that are worth talking about, like why ICP is the best companion chain of Bitcoin, how Omnity shared security works, and how it compares with some equivalent protocols like Babylon. But, I think it’s better to save it for the next time because it will take another few hours to cover all the topics.
Kyle Langhan| DFINITY: 100% we could set up a weekly series with Omnity and just start covering all those topics and get really, really deep into it, and I’m gonna just kind of plant that seed that maybe there’s something we should do like a more in-depth tech dive. I know I wanted to focus a lot on the Red Envelope today. You guys did a phenomenal job with that. I just want to stress the importance of:
A — Meeting your consumers where they are, just like you did right there in Telegram. And B — Having a way to engage with your community in a fun and viral way.
So, I hope a lot of people who are entrepreneurs and developers building on ICP right now, or building on any chain, honestly, are taking some notes, and I hope they reach out to Omnity to learn from you guys on your success and continue on. Where do people go? I have the Omnity X handle on here, but where else should they go to get more information?
Louis Liu| Omnity: Sure, please follow our Twitter, so we are about to make a lot of updates and announcements. On May 9th, Omnity will co-host Runes Asia in Hong Kong with a lot of highly-rated guests there. I think Casey himself will join this event. During the event, Omnity will announce this new positioning. We will explain how Omnity works as the liquidity and security hub for the Bitcoin ecosystem, and the token economics of Omnity will be published then.
Stay Tuned and Follow Omnity!
- Website: https://www.omnity.network/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/OmnityNetwork
- Discord: https://discord.gg/6GTJBkZA9Q
- Medium: https://medium.com/omnity
- Telegram: https://t.me/omnityofficial
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@OmnityNetwork
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/omnitynetwork/
- Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/omnitynetwork
